The Stump 340

With the supply chain tangled, we have what may be a brief moment to consider its flaws without being blinded by the glare of its surface efficiencies.

How might we discern the truth in a mad time? Wendell Berry and G.K. Chesterton offer some wisdom.

Elizabeth Stice remembers the impact of the events of 9/11 on college students 20 years ago. Now a college professor, she considers the disillusionment of her own students, and how…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Wichita, KS. That Charles Marohn is a friend to localist movements across the United States and beyond is indisputable. It’s not just that he has…

I bought myself an iPad in August 2016, and to say that it changed my life would be only a slight overstatement. For several years I had been experiencing increasingly…

The left is collectivizing, the right falling apart. Can a pragmatic, humanist center hold?

Hawley’s book goes some way towards providing a framework for using the threat of a legislative boot to stomp Big Tech back down to size. Whether the Right will listen…

Ethan Jones explores the harmful ways our culture relates to food, and concludes that food’s purpose is not beautification of the body. Rather, food itself is beauty. Inside and outside…

For those who still stand by the essential limiting power of words, these are trying times. In an age when homosexuality is immutable but gender is fluid, things can get…

Popular discourse in the United States today—as well as in many places around the world—hasn’t been so open to alternatives to the liberal capitalist mainstream for close to a century.

Lincoln wishes to promote Jeffersonian virtues by Hamiltonian means. In a Jeffersonian vein, Lincoln wants to encourage small, independent operations that free people from dependence on “the man.”

Wendell Berry pleads with us to see that true joy and fulfillment— the very motivations at the heart of Huck Finn and Christopher McCandless—are to be found not in escape…

Was the experience of “community” in an Ohio town during Ervin’s lifetime fundamentally more compelling and authentic than has been possible after the post-war economic boom? Or should Ervin’s passion…

Our disagreements are about real things, but people are real too.

Time and time again, in both mythic and recorded history, humans have celebrated the passing of a hardship by gathering together in merriment with good food and drink and song.

Daniel Elazar was emphatic that a “renewed sense of localism” was essential to America’s future. For Americans, this means renewed intentionality about our local communities, not merely living in one…

Rugged individualists need not be atomists; and there are compelling reasons why even Enlightenment liberals should be front porch republicans.

The conservationist recognizes that the society we live in, as much as the natural world we live in, was given to us as a gift with the demand that we…

The purpose of politics is to accrue power. Chavez knew this reality, and perhaps his funeral was his last, best opportunity to control the stage and direct the players.

Add the past year on to this already disturbing trend, and such destructive realities have only been further exacerbated. The need for human sociality is not a deficiency, nor is…

The Innovation Delusion goes a long way toward demystifying and destigmatizing the ordinary yet essential work of maintenance.

Our society may sometimes be divided on how to define right and wrong, but that has not dampened enthusiasm for identifying wrongdoing.

This is the humbling gift our children offer. If we seek to shape their character, at some point in the journey we’ll find ourselves backed into a corner, faced with…

Unfortunately, much of what is currently driving the discussion is not reason nor compassion but anger.